Some videos on Instagram may appear blurry while others are crystal clear. The quality of videos appears to depend on the number of views a post receives.

If we go by a video AMA from Instagram head Adam Mosseri, there is an explanation: “In general, we want to show the highest-quality video we can.... But if something isn’t watched for a long time — because the vast majority of views are in the beginning — we will move to a lower-quality video. And then if it’s watched again a lot then we’ll re-render the higher quality video.”

This is being done to show people “the highest-quality content we can”. The shift in quality “isn’t huge”, Mosseri said in response to another Threads user, who’d asked if that approach disadvantaged smaller creators. “It’s the right concern, but in practise it doesn’t seem to matter much, as the quality shift isn’t huge and whether or not people interact with videos is way more based on the content of the video than the quality. Quality seems to be much more important to the original creator, who is more likely to delete the video if it looks poor, than to their viewers.”

What Mosseri said is in line with what Meta had said in 2021. The company projected it wouldn’t be able to keep up with the increasing number of videos uploaded to the platform. (Meta estimated last year that it served four billion video streams per day on Facebook.)

To conserve computing resources, Meta offers fresh uploads fastest, most basic encoding. After a video “gets sufficiently high watch time”, it receives a better encoding pass.